Worcester doesn't have 29 Level 3 schools

So the big news coming out of this morning really has nothing to do with the Level 4 schools at all. The deputy commissioner, though, is a straight-answer kind of person, so I didn't hesitate to ask her about the 29 Level 3 schools she'd told us Worcester has when she came out to our meeting last month.

We don' t have them.

When Karla Brooks Baehr came out to our meeting, the state had developed the process for identifying Level 4 schools. They still figuring out how to identify Level 3 schools. She answered based on the work they'd done.
When they went back to the committee that meets with them on such things, they said what the state was coming up with didn't make much sense. The state was saying that we'll keep all of the federal designations around underperformance and also use the number crunched they did for Level 4 schools. If you had a federal designation under NCLB (for not meeting adequate yearly progress, for example), you'd keep it.
But for Level 1 and 2 schools, they were talking of keeping all NCLB designations in those catagories, so that a federal designation wouldn't be enough to knock you down to Level 3 or 4. So they pressed the state to make this consistent.

They have.

Now, your NCLB designation will not make you Level 3 or 4 (or what the state law calls "underperforming"). If the state cruches your MCAS data (and graduation data for high schools) and you're in the lowest 20% of the state, you're Level 3.
Nothing else can get you there.
As such, according to the deputy commissioner, when the list comes out this fall (they're waiting to include another year of MCAS scores), Worcester will have fewer than 29 Level 3 schools.

Note that this also means that the statistic that '70% of Worcester schools are underperforming according to the state' is also no longer the case.